What makes soldiers fight

The simulations also illuminated that any military game or simulation seeking to represent realistic force-on-force combat should include will to fight.

The graph below is an example simulation run depicting the state changes to a squad leader's traits when one or more stressors e. Marked increases in anxiety and anger, and fluctuations in stability, collectively resulted in behavioral changes over time.

Stressors that trigger a flight event can cause state changes in anger and anxiety, which results in behavior change. Trait-state behavioral modifications to both sides while under a direct fire stressor were applied.

More than 1 in 10 soldiers exhibited flight behavior that would not have appeared in a "supersoldier" simulation. The purpose of the military unit model is to inform understanding of will to fight from the squad through the division-levels.

How can the United States and its allies break adversary will? How can the will to fight of partners be strengthened? Until there is a broadly accepted physiological, psychological, neurological, and cultural model of humans, the best a model can do is to help reduce uncertainty, improve understanding, and identify strengths and weaknesses, surfaces and gaps.

The model can and should be used as a military analysis tool, whether as a quick-turn application by a military advisor in the field or a year-long intelligence effort by a team of analysts to understand adversary and allied disposition to fight. What are the political, economic, and military variables that may strengthen or weaken national will to fight, and which are most important? Will to fight is complex, dynamic, and difficult to predict. At the national level, this means that leaders must focus on understanding the variables that drive their wartime decisionmaking and that of their allies and adversaries while also remaining sensitive to war's horrific costs.

The RAND national model is portable and exploratory: Each of the 15 variables can be applied to a wide range of historical and future conflict scenarios. Some variables will be more relevant than others, depending on the particular scenario, and how the variables are tailored for the circumstances will vary, but this model provides a useful starting point for discussion and can drive a much-needed dialogue among analysts conducting threat assessments, contingency plans, wargames, and other efforts requiring conflict evaluation.

Will to fight has across-the-board importance in war. It is essential to building effective military teams, to designing effective tactics and strategies, to planning effective military operations, to assessing and engaging allies, to analyzing adversaries, to reducing risk, and to carrying out successful military operations. It matters most for force-on-force combat, but it also matters for routine military activities and national policy.

The human will to fight, to act, and to drive through adversity is the central factor in war. In light of growing tensions with countries such as Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran, it seems prudent to open a rigorous dialogue within the United States and with U. Incorporating the concept of will to fight in the analysis of potential future conflicts will help leaders, strategic thinkers, planners, combat advisers, and analysts improve their assessments of what may happen in various conflict scenarios and what to do about it.

The models presented in these reports provide a guide to assessment and analysis, not a mathematical formula. With our models and reports, we hope to stimulate the dialogue necessary to develop the concept of will to fight further and incorporate it into strategic decisionmaking and planning.

Ben Connable , Michael J. McNerney , et al. Michael J. McNerney , Ben Connable , et al. RAND research briefs present policy-oriented summaries of individual published, peer-reviewed documents or of a body of published work.

Permission is given to duplicate this electronic document for personal use only, as long as it is unaltered and complete. Copies may not be duplicated for commercial purposes. The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis.

For Pfc. Autumn M. Smith, a year-old soldier assigned to a Patriot missile team in the Saudi capital, the ground war--and with it, the mind-numbing terror of combat--began on the night of Jan.

Facing an incoming barrage of Scuds that, as far as she knew, could have spewed out deadly chemical agents, Smith scrambled out of her protected bunker and raced yards through deafening noise, molten debris and blinding smoke to help reload the canister for the next volley.

Eddie Wilson, described her performance as common valor. As American ground troops plunge into combat against Iraqi troops, there is heightened interest in what it is that makes GIs stand and fight in the face of burning trenches, artillery fire and the sight of mutilated comrades.

Although military doctrine emphasizes training and leadership, most military specialists agree that U. Wes Fox, a Vietnam veteran and Medal of Honor winner. Traditionally, military tenets have held that soldiers fight hardest for the smallest unit they are serving with.

Todd Burnett, a year-old squad leader. David Dumas, a year-old combat engineer, agreed. Accordingly, most military training traditionally has stressed the importance of the buddy system. Somebody trying to kill you. Maybe you have to be there — experience it for yourself — but I agree with him. Tony skydives occasionally to chase the rush, but mainly he works out his restlessness at the gym.

I could think about it for weeks after. It was sweet and very intoxicating. She read terrified, miserable accounts as well. Bourke says that taboo may have lead some historians to ignore accounts of enjoying combat in favor of more sober accounts of suffering and shell shock. But amid all the criticism Bourke says she also got letters from combat veterans thanking her for making them feel like it was OK to talk about these experiences of exhilaration. The author works for a health agency related to the Department of Defense.

After that the lead author told me it was too risky to talk, so with her permission I reached out to another author: Charles Hoge, a senior scientist at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. He explained that the lead scientist had noticed something about some of the veterans she was treating for post-traumatic stress disorder.

The team found patients would constantly try and recreate the feelings of combat by playing war video games, watching war documentaries and scrolling through deployment photos. It was getting in the way of their work and social lives. The capacity for self-sacrifice among human beings is nowhere more evident than in the bond between soldiers during war. Some combat veterans have felt that their lives never mattered more than when they were in combat.

This sense of meaning and purpose grows out of protecting, and being protected by, their comrades in arms—a shared commitment to safeguard one another's lives that is non-negotiable and only deepens with time.

Men become mothers to one another in combat. Carrying the wounded Time Life Archive Killing. Young soldiers in combat inevitably confront killing. They take life away from others, and in so doing breach one of the most fundamental moral values of their society, often with long-term consequences. Fighting for survival in Vietnam, Karl Marlantes often felt satisfaction when his unit killed the enemy.

In later years, he felt haunted by those deaths, as do other combat veterans.